Anne Jackson

As Contributor

Anne Jackson

In 1926, Anne Jackson was born in Millvale, Pennsylvania, a town set on the Allegheny River opposite Pittsburgh. Her family was forced to relocate to New York City during the depression so that her father could find a means to support them, a feat he achieved as a barber. On arriving in New York, the family first lived in an abandoned windmill in Brooklyn before finding their way to a tenement on Liberty Avenue.

Jackson’s fascination with theatre and film began in those early days of New York and continued to deepen as she made her way onto Broadway with a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse, where in 1943 she began to study full time. She earned parts in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, performing in several plays by Tennessee Williams, including Summer and Smoke and The Property is Condemned, during which she met her future husband, a fellow Playhouse actor, Eli Wallach.

Later in her career, Jackson appeared in film and television. Her screen credits range from The Shining to Law & Order. She has now been married Wallach for over 65 years and currently teaches at a theatre arts non-profit organization, HB Studio in Manhattan.

This collection of previously unpublished one-acts includes some of Tennessee Williams’s most poignant and hilarious characters: the tough and outrageous drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens…; the betrayed wife who refuses to take a lover in The Fat Man’s Wife; and the extravagant mistress who cheats on her married man in The Pink Bedroom.
Most of these plays were written in the 1930s and early 1940s, when Williams was already flexing his formindable theatrical imaginations: lovers scramble for quick assignations in the closed movie theater balcony of These Are the Stairs You’ve Got to Watch; Chekovian-style family ennui in Summer at the Lake leads to heartbreak; and in Thank You, Kind Spirit a mulatto spiritualist from New Orleans’ French Quarter is visciously exposed as a fraud – or is she?…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”